A rigorous path integral for quantum spin using flatspace Wiener regularization
Bernhard G. Bodmann, Hajo Leschke, Simone Warzel
Abstract
Adapting ideas of Daubechies and Klauder [J. Math. Phys. 26 (1985) 2239] we derive a rigorous continuum path-integral formula for the semigroup generated by a spin Hamiltonian. More precisely, we use spin-coherent vectors parametrized by complex numbers to relate the coherent representation of this semigroup to a suitable Schrödinger semigroup on the Hilbert space L2 (R2) of Lebesgue squareintegrable functions on the Euclidean plane R2. The path-integral formula emerges from the standard Feynman-Kac-Itô formula for the Schrödinger semigroup in the ultra-diffusive limit of the underlying Brownian bridge on R2. In a similar vein, a path-integral formula can be constructed for the coherent representation of the unitary time evolution generated by the spin Hamiltonian.